From peeping into people's windows to spying through the bushes to constantly checking updates on Facebook and MySpace, the chance to peer into someone else's life has always been difficult to resist.

"It's such a timeless impulse to watch people and look in windows," says playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, "and now we have more technology to do it instantly on our computers. So we're more hidden in a way. You don't actually have to stand outside someone's windows, although people still do that."

Nachtrieb lives in San Francisco and is the award-winning writer of 2006's "Hunter Gatherers." He is exploring voyeurism in his new comedy, "T.I.C. (Trenchcoat in Common)." In "T.I.C.," a teenage girl just moved in with her father in a cottage behind a tenancy-in-common apartment building. The girl starts to spy on her neighbors - who include a flasher, a musician and an older female activist - then begins blogging about them.

The girl catches her neighbors' private moments, bits of conversation and times when people don't necessarily want to be seen - even though, in their own ways, each of her neighbors wants to be noticed.

"They get noticed," Nachtrieb says, "and they also get exposed."

The girl thinks she's writing the blog and its comments just for herself, but, as the play progresses, people start to read her writing. Ultimately, she uncovers something sinister going on in the building.

"I was curious about how the threshold of exposing oneself and also observing other people has been lowered so much in recent years and thinking of a fun way to talk about that," says Nachtrieb, who started working on the play about two years ago. The playwright says that while he's interested in the idea of voyeurism, he also wanted to explore how more people are willing to expose themselves - including on blogs and social networking Web sites. Nachtrieb, who says he does some "light blogging," says he's interested in how people share their thoughts that way.

"You feel like you know something about somebody," Nachtrieb says of reading blogs. "You do, you know something about somebody, but you've never actually met the person. So I feel like I know things, like when someone posts their little update, their status update, I feel connected to them. ... It's a new way of how we interact with people."